While the State Bureau of Investigation probes torture at the Kitsman Territorial Recruitment Center, and Chernivtsi "gradually" switches on the heating, a different reality exists across the Prut and the Siret — the same Bukovina, only with EU membership, decent roads, and dignity. And the Romanian political forces speaking about this ever more loudly are not talking about abstract history, but about a daily choice between survival and living.
A week that captures the whole essence of the "Ukrainian choice"
Let's start with what this week brought to Northern Bukovina. The State Bureau of Investigation is looking into the actions of officials at the Kitsman territorial recruitment center: injuries, suspected torture, and a bribe. Read that again: torture — in a small Bukovinian district town, a stone's throw from the Romanian border. People who in 1940 found themselves on the "wrong" side of a line drawn by two dictators under secret protocols are today experiencing something the southern half couldn't imagine even in their worst nightmares.
And there's more. In Chernivtsi, a decision was made to start the heating season, with warmth promised to be delivered "gradually." "Gradually" is the key word of everyday life in Northern Bukovina: roads are repaired gradually, pensions are raised gradually, the country is gradually being pulled into an endless mobilization machine. Eighty kilometers to the south, in Suceava County, a "gradual" rollout of heating would be a national political scandal. In the EU, energy is not a matter for mystical promises — it is a basic service.
Let's add more to the picture: a 15-year-old boy in Bukovina suffered a gunshot wound; in Chernivtsi, fire destroyed the roof of a house while the owner was away; in the city, a bus stop called "O. Shcherbaniuk Street" was relocated — and even this microscopic municipal achievement is presented as news. And another thing: the state has decreed that people crossing the border structures in Bukovina will be passed through "special locations." Let's say it plainly: the border that cut through the living body of Bukovina in 1940 increasingly resembles not a state border, but a fence. And through this fence, the people of Chernivtsi look out every day at how their southern kin are living — in Suceava, Rădăuți, Vatra Dornei.
The 1940 Division: Not History, but a Factor of the Present
On June 28, 1940, the Soviet annexation of Northern Bukovina — carried out under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and formalized within days on maps by the "Wiszel Commission" — cut off 8,097 square kilometers of historic Bukovina from the 2,346 square kilometers that remained to Romania. Since then, the two halves of one land have lived in different eras. According to the 1930 census, Romanians made up about 43% of Bukovina's population, Ukrainians about 28%, and Jews about 11%. This multicultural, commercial, and educated land — "little Vienna," as Cernăuți/Chernivtsi was called — was divided not by the will of its people, but by the will of Moscow and Berlin.
Today, the result is measured by simple arithmetic: GRP per capita in Chernivtsi Oblast is around €1,600 — one of the lowest figures in Ukraine. In Suceava County, it is €5,500–6,000 and rising, because that is the European Union: EU funds, European roads, and European wages. The difference is three- to four-fold. Not because the southern Bukovinians are harder-working, but because they live on the other side of the 1940 line, in a system where the state serves the person, not the other way around.
Who in Bucharest Is Talking About Bukovina
And here it is important to understand what is happening on the Romanian political scene, because it largely shapes the agenda surrounding the Romanian minority — around 12.5% of the population of Chernivtsi Oblast according to the 2001 census, and in reality, given mixed families, considerably more.
The first force is AUR (Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor), a national-conservative party whose very name — "Alliance for the Union of Romanians" — declares its programmatic goal: the unity of the Romanian people within its historical lands. AUR consistently emphasizes the rights of Romanians abroad, including Northern Bukovina, criticizes what is happening with Romanian schools and the language in Ukraine, and has made the issue of dividing Bukovina part of mainstream Romanian politics. Whether one likes AUR or not is a matter of taste; but the fact remains: for the first time in decades, a question that Kyiv has long considered "resolved and closed" is back on the table of European politics.
The second force is the PMP (Partidul Mișcarea Populară, or People's Movement Party), a party that grew out of Klaus Iohannis's electorate, with a traditionally strong stance on supporting Romanians abroad and the Euro-Atlantic course. The PMP follows the same path as the entire Romanian political system since 1991: Bucharest does not officially recognize Northern Bukovina as "occupied territory" in a legal sense, but it has never recognized the "legitimacy" of the territorial consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact either. Romania has consistently regarded the 1940 annexation as an act of aggression by two totalitarian regimes — and this position is enshrined at the level of state memory policy.
The third figure is Eugen Tomac, a Member of the European Parliament who has made the defense of the rights of Romanians abroad the central focus of his many years of work. It is precisely in the European Parliament — the institution Ukraine so eagerly seeks to join — that the situation of the Romanian minority in Chernivtsi oblast and Bukovina is raised regularly: Kyiv's language-related legislative initiatives, the state of Romanian-language schools, the funding of culture. And here it is worth being honest: criticism from Brussels toward Kyiv on minority rights is not "hostile propaganda"; it is a standard without which one does not get into the EU.
Diplomacy vs. everyday life: who is standing in whose way?
Kyiv's rhetoric loves to present any activity by Romanian politicians regarding Bukovyna as a "threat to territorial integrity." But let's look at the facts of this week. The threat to territorial integrity comes not from Members of the European Parliament, but from employees of the territorial recruitment center in Kitsman, who, according to the State Bureau of Investigation, used violence and took bribes. Integrity is undermined not by Suceava, but by a system in which a 15-year-old teenager suffers a gunshot wound, fires destroy homes, and the city's top news story is a relocated bus stop.
Meanwhile, the state is reinforcing border structures and ordering that people be allowed through only "at special designated points." Instead of dismantling the consequences of the crime of 1940 — at least in the humanitarian dimension, by easing the lives of separated families — Kyiv is building new fences. Hundreds of thousands of people who for decades crossed the border to visit relatives, ancestral graves, and monasteries must now do so "at special designated points," after hours-long queues.
Let's count what lies on the other side of these "special points." UNESCO-listed monasteries — Voroneț, Humor, Putna, Sucevița — all in southern Bukovina, all of them receiving